Tuesday, October 5, 2010: TWOfer Tuesday - The "Hanging Out In Athens" Edition

I was an Art Major in college, with my emphasis in Drawing & Painting. Later on I worked towards a Master's Degree in Theology.

I have a resume that screams "No Marketable Skills".

We'll get back to theology later. Today we're talking about my time in art school.

Two schools, actually; two years and change in a local community college to get my Associates Degree, and several years after that to get the full Bachelors Degree.

I was the only person I know of in community college who didn't change their major. Changing majors seemed rampant, especially in the Art Department. Either people coming into the program from other (read, "more boring") majors like Accounting, or people leaving the Art Department for more profitable majors, like Accounting. I was pretty much the only person who walked in on day one saying, "I'd like to major in Art, please", and leaving two years later with an Associate of Arts Degree.

In short, I really couldn't imagine doing anything else. As cliché as it sounds, art was my life.

I learned early on, however, that there are two types of people who attend art college. There are those who are interested in being artists, and there are those who are interested in making art.  I was most definitely in the second group.

Truth is, I busted my ass in college.  I love those people who think an Art degree is an easy ticket.  I guarantee you I worked harder than any marketing major, or finance, or any number of other majors on those campuses.  Art majors put in longer hours, more money and, more importantly, more of their soul and flesh into their major than pretty much anyone else. Fact.

That said, it always bothered me that while I was working hard making great art but somehow I still looked like a dork, while so many others just oozed cool from every fashionable, malnourished bone in their body. Even though they barely bothered to lift a brush.

Not that I'm bitter.  Okay, maybe a little.  But, I get the appeal of living the (imagined) lifestyle of an artist, I really do.  Looking around at the bland conformity of your surroundings, or perhaps seeing your parents slave away at some mind-numbing, soul-crushing job wasting away the best of their lives for a paycheck that will only be gone soon as it arrives, it is easy to reject that path and try to find something more "fulfilling", whatever that means.

Besides, doesn't everyone deep down in their heart of hearts long to be interesting?

That's what is so cool about these two songs (somewhat) documenting the bohemian life of Athens, Georgia, where bands like REM and the B-52s made their name.  You can sit at your desk in some mundane office building, put on the B-52's, and suddenly you're no wage slave; you're a beatnik, a maverick, an iconoclast living life as a carefree spirit, freewheeling along and shunning the idea of working for a living.  Dancing in the garden in torn sheets in the rain.  You're skinny dipping in the early morning hours after attending happening parties where art and politics and religion and life were debated, hootch consumed, desire cultivated and debauchery consummated behind every door.

Without even having to get paint on your clothes.

Enjoy.